I want the number of comments to appear above the fold. Though it was clutter, so if few people were using it, whatever.
At the very least in the discussion section, where # of comments is a much better indicator of value than # of upvotes.
I want the number of comments to appear on the recent posts page, which is something they didn't used to do.
My only major issue with it is that posts on the main or discussion page no longer show the number of comments they've received, or even that they've received new comments. Being able to tell this at a glance was an extremely useful ability.
I do not like the icons. I want them to be words.
The colors will take some getting used to but I don't really hate them.
The extra linebreaks on the right sidebar annoy me.
And we still can't view upvotes and downvotes separately on comments argh.
Agree with all of the above. Also, drop-down menus frustrate me when I misaim a mouse click, frustrate me when using a very slow computer, frustate me when Javascript is off, and are generally the spawn of Satan.
On the plus side: whee, it looks pretty and light and stuff! (The thick borders are ugly - maybe keep lime for new comments but don't change border width.) Turning karma bubbles to karma bricks was a good idea. The header and footer are good (though the two icons are too dark for many screen configurations). The "nearby meetups" section is a really, really good idea. Yay.
I thought so too at first, and was annoyed, but it seems that icons are more inclusive, as they don't unnecessarily favor native English speakers.
This might be a more important consideration for a website that wasn't, you know, based around arguing subtle points in fairly precise English.
komponisto pointed out earlier that "Hall of Fame" has connotations we may not want. I'm surprised that got changed when nobody seemed to disagree with him. I suggest that be reverted. (Obviously this is minor, though.)
Also, I'd like to repeat my suggestion that the "New on OB" sidebar section have "Overcoming Bias" as a link so I can jump to the blog rather than individual posts.
I'm disapointed with the new graphic behind the lesswrong logo.
I always used the territory vs the map graphic to explain to people what lesswrong is about.
I really don't like the reply icon. I see it and think "ah, that's something for sending a reply via a private-message facility. So what do I have to do to reply here?" Any chance of changing it to something that doesn't feature an envelope?
(Also, I agree with Alicorn: the all-caps username is bad. Does it have anything to recommend it at all?)
Positive:
Not sure about:
Negative:
The comments have become significantly farther apart. Too much scrolling is required to read them.
Looking at the discussion and main pages, the number of comments for each post doesn't seem to be displayed anymore. Does that mean I have to separately open each post I'm interested in to see if there are new comments? Meh.
Given that we want:
The solution seems simple. If there are no replies to a comment, allow it to be deleted. If there are replies, retract instead of deleting.
Also, whatever happened to the idea of havng separate buttons for "agree" and "vote up". I think this is an important distinction to make -- it is very useful to know both:
1) which comments are agreed with, but not necessarily high-quality ways of arguing for them, and
2) which comments are disagreed with, but are regarded as articulate and worthy of response.
And IIRC, the voters in favor of separate buttons were coming out ahead.
Extremely Bad: It is no longer possible to delete comments, only "retract" them (with usernames remaining displayed).
Actually, I think I like this. You can still edit, so if there's something that you don't want even under a strikethrough, you can get rid of it; but the default is just to cross it out, and this encourages people to do that instead. Deleted comments with replies have been seriously disruptive in the past, so this is an improvement.
this is very intentional.
Anonymous didn't suggest it was an oversight. He declared it Extremely Bad. An entirely different axis.
The borders on comments are fairly ugly, and far too thick. When I go to view all my comments, the way they are listed there is much more aesthetically pleasing.
I like the new header. The footer is a great improvement.
Mixed feelings about the thumbs up/down icons. I like icons, and they are smaller than the text "Vote up" and "Vote down", but they actually end up taking more space than the text, because their vertical height is greater. Perhaps they can be shrunk a bit and placed in the title line of the comment, along with the permalink and reply icon? You could potentially hide all the icons unless you're mousing over the comment, to avoid clutter.
Because my username is fairly long, it overlaps with the "Create new article" button, which is annoying.
As a somewhat casual reader and participant, my immediate reaction (regardless of functionality, which I really haven't tried out yet) is that the new design is horrendously ugly compared to the old one. I was intending to go through the Sequences soon, but the visual change is a pretty strong disincentive.
If at all possible, I'd like the ability to view posts using the old interface.
I had a stack of business cards printed for myself, using the (old) style of a comment box. They arrived yesterday.
Vote up if you want all three options with restricted deletion: edit anything, retract anything, delete only comments without children.
More than anything I greatly miss the ability to see the number of comments on a post without having to click through to the post. Number of comments is - to me - even more important information than Karma. Please put back!
Hah, you can retract a comment, then edit it. But you can't un-retract it o.o That doesn't even make sense to me.
I'd seriously suggest allowing for "delete", and reserving retract for comments that have replies.
Overall conclusion: This redesign is an utter abomination. Yes, the Karma bubble fix is useful and the 'Nearby Meetups' feature is of interest. But every other intervention seems to be a bad idea. I particularly despise the removal of the delete feature.
I also have not the slightest illusion about my ability to influence your decision now or then.
Have I earned that? I've changed my mind about a number of our design and functionality decisions in light of comments made in the past 24hrs. Is there some past public discussion I should review that's good evidence I failed to change my mind when I should have?
wedrifid, you seem grumpier today than you have on any other day I've read your excellent contributions to this site. I'm pretty sure that I have an open mind today, because I've today concluded that several of our design decisions were errors/sub-optimal, and I'm working to fix them. All of them were (I hope obviously) made in good faith. Are you thinking clearly and positively about how you can best get your way today, or are you feeling grumpy and venting?
Please, try hard to just win. I'll try to help you.
If you constrained your influence to improving the graphical presentation then your work would be a valuable contribution worthy of much appreciation.
I'd love to give you an opportunity to retract that sentence. I think it implies more than is reasonable.
Yea, at first I thought it looked cool, but after the first 5 seconds the whole thing seems problematic. Not only is there mystery meat navigation, but it's also really hard to see which links you've clicked before. And the whiteness is way overdone to the point I get snowblind and have to squint in order to see where one post ends and the next begins.
The whole actually doing things in practice and so is admirable... but sorry the execution sucks, please revert and have it opt-in until you've worked out all the quirks.
Some of the links are a black-ish color, which is a problem, because the "visited link" color is gray. The usual convention is that a visited link is darker, so this is very confusing. I also personally find the two colors to be a bit too close even if they were swapped.
I accidentally clicked the little eyeball at the bottom of a post, which hid it. Now I can't even see it if I browse to the permalink.
Also, there's no number of comments on posts on the front or new pages, nor link to the comments.
I understand that the changes are still ongoing to some degree, but I will be fairly upset if there is no modification to make it easier to access users' comment histories, as I described here in the redesign suggestion thread.
In addition, I had to flip through my comments one page at a time to find that link, because the "load more comments" link at the end of the main suggestion thread is not functioning properly, i.e. it does not appear to be loading all of the comments.
ETA: The new "load all comments" link appears to function correc...
I preferred when there was a prominent, single-click link from the main page to recent comments. It's always been the main way I've navigated the site, and I think it may have helped draw people to the site's content, much of which is in the comments, including comments on top-level posts that don't in themselves look interesting.
Apparent glitch I've found: on the Wiki page the header stretches all the way horizontally on my screen, in contrast to the Main and Discussion sections where the pages are horizontally bounded. Now, I have 22' widescreen monitor with 1920x1080 resolution and the Wiki header appears to be not big enough to fit my screen and thus it abruptly ends around 90% of the screen on the right side, leaving the SIAI and FHI logos with a partially white background.
Does "NEARBY MEETUPS" sort at all? The Austin, TX meetup I made that's a few miles down the road is displayed second after a meetup in the UK (which is actually spam). (Note: I have set my location to Austin, TX.)
Once a polling system is implemented, I would like to see a poll that lists all the changes with "better, worse, or neutral" so that we can get a more accurate representation of what people like and dislike. I hesitate to write my own response of "I agree to X but still like Y" whenever somebody lists multiple likes/dislikes. It would clutter the page and not help very much unless many people responded.
It would have been nice if somebody took screenshots of the old version so we could compare. Some things are much easier to tell the dif...
A couple of points / whining:
It'll do. I like that it highlights new comments (but I'm not too keen on how the highlighting is done -- the thick green border looks pale and fuzzy).
There are a few glitches (even after cache-clearing):
My username is long enough that the end disappears behind the "Create new article" button.
The number of comments on a post is no longer displayed except in the page for that post.
Loading lesswrong.com gives a page in which none of "Promoted", "New", "Top", or "Saved" is highlighted.
"Nearby meetings&quo...
I have some good news:
I like that it highlights new comments (but I'm not too keen on how the highlighting is done -- the thick green border looks pale and fuzzy).
We'll review that styling.
My username is long enough that the end disappears behind the "Create new article" button.
Agreed - we'll fix that.
The number of comments on a post is no longer displayed except in the page for that post.
An oversight. We'll fix that.
Loading lesswrong.com gives a page in which none of "Promoted", "New", "Top", or "Saved" is highlighted.
Changes coming to lesswrong.com - they didn't quite make the presses.
"Nearby meetings" shows a single meeting, in Australia. I am in the U.K. How is the site deciding what is "nearby"?
Of the set of 3 meetups that have been entered into the new system, those are the 3 closest. That list will likely look much better in a few days (as others enter new meetups to the new system).
Is there any page I can go to to see all forthcoming meetups, regardless of location? If I was travelling, I might very well want to know of meetups not currently "nearby".
Click the meetups tit...
Will_Newsome points out that we haven't thanked you. Some of us have thought of listing changes they liked as well as changes they disliked, some of us have thought of correcting for bias against change, some of us have thought of simply not being jerks. But we haven't thought of thanking you.
So, thanks. Thanks for making LW better. Thanks for working on new ideas even if you'll get bitten if they're bad and ignored if they're good. Thanks for taking criticism into account. Thanks for being nice even when criticism isn't of the form "Changes A through F rock, changes G and H are neutral, change I annoys me but that seems personal, change J was a bad idea, change K was good but change K' would have been better", but of the form "You suck".
You're awesome. Have some karma.
"Main" feels way too bright and washed out. "Discussion" strikes a better balance.
(ETA2: ah, strike that - I was having the same weird caching issue many others have mentioned.)
This will take some getting used to.
ETA: also I regret that the tagline "a community blog, etc" has been rendered all but invisible in the main masthead (insufficient contrast) and in discussion (type too small). Either remove the tagline entirely or make sure it can be read - don't sit on the fence.
ETA3: so the tagline is OK on the main site, but my co...
A bug: in the previous design, comments on the old posts that were imported from Overcoming Bias could only by sorted by "old." The new "Sort By" dropdown menu now allows the user to select the other sorting methods on the old posts, although they don't change the actual sorting of the comments. There should probably be some flag added to those old posts to prevent the dropdown menu from appearing to prevent future confusion.
I like the icons, the karma bubble fix, and the meetup section.
The new layout and colors are neutral to me - neither better nor worse than the old ones.
I'm not sure how I feel about the lime green border to highlight new comments. It's slightly useful, but mildly ugly.
I'll miss the map-territory header. I'm not sure what the new one is supposed to be. It does look better, though.
Not being able to see the number of comments on the main and discussion pages is annoying, even if aesthetically pleasing.
The new retraction mechanic is silly. I wish deletion was back.
I still think it's an improvement overall, and I support a policy of "when in doubt, experiment" and "it's better to ask for forgiveness than for permission".
Better:
Temporary setbacks
Too easy to double post. ie. I saw an entire page in recent comments in which there was not a single single post evident.
That helped: we should disable the Comment button when you click it. Thanks for the bug report.
Please don't do this. In the event of a network failure, this can leave one unable to retry submitting a comment; I have actually experienced this on sites other than LW.
Instead, assign a unique identifier to each created comment form, and if the server receives two submissions with the same identifier, consider the second one an edit to the first comment. (Even client-side pseudorandom identifiers would be good enough for these purposes.)
This is a test to determine my ability to ban my own comments as a stopgap measure for the inability to delete, until this horrible, horrible oversight is corrected.
Retraction-with-the-strikethrough is like divorce to deletion's annulment. When I delete comments, here are some motives not addressed by retraction:
I got simuposted by someone whose comment was similar and as good or better, and want to quietly remove the excess without leaving any clutter. (Or, I double-posted myself.)
I realize that I said something really, really stupid and don't want to admit to having said anything in the first place.
The only reply to my comment is from a source I don't want to interact and I wish to remove myself from the thread, rather than being tempted to abuse mod powers for the purpose of not interacting with the source.
I haven't actually changed my mind, but I decided that I didn't want to air the contents of the comment in a public forum, or someone else complained of a privacy violation; I don't want to draw attention to there ever having been a comment in the relevant location.
It's possible that comments with children, especially with several children, should exhibit more limited behaviors than those without; but the retraction/editing options are not sufficient.
In addition, retracted comments now have the undesirable property of being MORE visible on the page than normal comments -- the strikethrough draws the eye. It'd be better to have a link to view the original comment, e.g. something like:
[retracted by author -- click to view original]
My input: what the fuck happened to the site???
Edit: This was just intended to convey my immediate, gut reaction to the site. Of course I can find out what happened, I did so, and I elaborated in other comments. I leave this here as a reminder of my initial expression of shock.
"AAUGH! LESSWRONG IS USING MYSTERY MEAT NAVIGATION!!!"
Not exactly mystery meat, the icons contain some information. A real MMN would have all icons looking the same, or at least having shapes unrelated to their function.
By the way, the Web Pages That Suck site is amusing, but since I have seen it for the first time I wonder whether the site itself has a fairly sucking design on purpose.
I am seeing a few glitches - the "+" and "-" icons are cut off at the right, so they are surrounded by Cs not circles - but overall this a big improvement. Thanks to the people at Tricycle for a great job!
There are definitely some wrinkles to iron out. Make the images the right size and readable, maybe also increase the contrast in some of the colors. Actually I'm seeing a lot of wrinkles. We should probably make a laundry list and see if there's any way the community can help.
I'm very happy that there's a meetup system now, so the revamp is definitely a good thing overall. But there's still work to do.
I'm not a big fan of the big green ovals. Maybe it would be better if it remained circle for two characters and only expanded for 3 or more? People's karma reaches high levels, but posts usually only have double digit karma. Then a list like the main discussion page would be uniform.
Hmm, after using it for some bit I notice that I seem to care less about karma, and be a lot more prone to up-voting things. I am not sure if this is a good or a bad thing.
Presumably this as somehting to do with the interface, maybe somehting as simple as attaching less weight to a thumbs up than to a vote.
For some reason, the new design is (sometimes) very sluggish on my iPhone. Can the tricyclists look into this?
Another iPhone bug report: since the post buttons have mouseover behaviours, you need to tap it twice to actually click it, which can be annoying. Though I'm not sure what the best alternative would be, since people on mobile devices should still be able to see what the buttons do before clicking them. Maybe just show them as text on mobile browsers?)
(Actually, a whole mobile-formatted version of the site would be great, but I know that would be a larger project…)
Also, the Singularity Institute logos and FHI Institute logos in the upper right corner aren't visible at all until I mouseover them.
EDIT: The problem went away when I hit "Refresh". It looks just fine now.
A blog shouldn't tell readers to adjust their hardware in order to view it properly.
Readers have a ridiculously wide variety of hardware (several generations of multiple platforms of desktop and laptop computers; plus a few generations of mobile device). If you're creating for the general Web, you have to design within the constraints imposed by that diversity, not tell people that they have to adjust their gear to compensate for the site's design.
Plus: the new reply icon is a big improvement over the envelope. It looks like a public discussion now.
Minor bug in the highlighting of new comments, though: clicking on any link to a comment (e..g in the recent comments or your inbox) causes you to go to a partial view of the containing post, and it resets the "new" status for the page, meaning you can't then look around for other new comments on that page. The newness should only be reset when you view the page proper, if it can't be reset on a comment-by-comment basis (and I'm assuming it ca...
Too easy to double post. ie. I saw an entire page in recent comments in which there was not a single single post evident.
Hah, you can retract a comment, then edit it. But you can't un-retract it o.o
Overall conclusion: This redesign is an utter abomination. Yes, the Karma bubble fix is useful and the 'Nearby Meetups' feature is of interest. But every other intervention seems to be a bad idea. I particularly despise the removal of the delete feature.
Too easy to double post. ie. I saw an entire page in recent comments in which there was not a single single post evident.
Too easy to double post. ie. I saw an entire page in recent comments in which there was not a single single post evident.
Too easy to double post. ie. I saw an entire page in recent comments in which there was not a single single post evident.
Too easy to double post. ie. I saw an entire page in recent comments in which there was not a single single post evident.
Too easy to double post. ie. I saw an entire page in recent comments in which there was not a single single post evident.
Too easy to double post. ie. I saw an entire page in recent comments in which there was not a single single post evident.
Too easy to double post. ie. I saw an entire page in recent comments in which there was not a single single post evident.
Too easy to double post. ie. I saw an entire page in recent comments in which there was not a single single post evident.
Too easy to double post. ie. I saw an entire page in recent comments in which there was not a single single post evident.
Too easy to double post. ie. I saw an entire page in recent comments in which there was not a single single post evident.
Too easy to double post. ie. I saw an entire page in recent comments in which there was not a single single post evident.
Too easy to double post. ie. I saw an entire page in recent comments in which there was not a single single post evident.
Too easy to double post. ie. I saw an entire page in recent comments in which there was not a single single post evident.
Too easy to double post. ie. I saw an entire page in recent comments in which there was not a single single post evident.
This is a test to see how retracting of comments works.
This is an edit.
This is an edit done after retraction. It appears, but the comment is still retracted. Strange that one may edit a retracted comment, but not unretract (tract?) it.
Some edits done to a comment after it was retracted
This is me testing if the "Retract" button does anything more interesting than deletion.
What happened to the agree/disagree buttons that were voted on, and why?
Bad: There is no longer any visible difference between promoted and non-promoted posts (all circles are green).
Extremely Bad: It is no longer possible to delete comments, only "retract" them (with usernames remaining displayed).
Extremely Bad: It is no longer possible to delete comments, only "retract" them (with usernames remaining displayed).
Actually, I think I like this. You can still edit, so if there's something that you don't want even under a strikethrough, you can get rid of it; but the default is just to cross it out, and this encourages people to do that instead. Deleted comments with replies have been seriously disruptive in the past, so this is an improvement.
I saw some discussion posts earlier talking about a LessWrong redesign, and now that things look different, I guess that it's been implemented. I'm always slightly annoyed for a while when a site I use gets redesigned because I have to relearn where everything is, but it eventually wears off once I'm used to the changes.
My initial impressions:
"Hmmm... it seems like the category menus have been replaced by dropdown menus. It's not like I used many of them anyway."
"Okay, I've clicked my name to see my recently posted comments. Now, where's the link to see it in context? Oh, I guess I have to click that icon in the lower right corner. For some reason I was looking for something at the upper right of the comment box."
"Well, that worked. Now how do I click to the parent comment? Oh, wait, it's probably one of those new icons in the lower right corner. I'll just mouseover them to see what they do..."
::realization sets in::
"AAUGH! LESSWRONG IS USING MYSTERY MEAT NAVIGATION!!!"
So, what does everyone else think of the new redesign?